Grace is Not Faceless: Reflections on Mary by Ann Loades - Introduction by DLT Books

Grace is Not Faceless Reflections on Mary

Ann Loades, CBE Edited and Introduced by Stephen Burns

First published in 2021 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd 1 Spencer Court 140–142 Wandsworth High Street London SW18 4JJ Copyright © 2021 Ann Loades The right of Ann Loades to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ISBN: 978-0-232-53420-7 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Scripture quotations are taken from Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Phototypeset by Kerrypress, St Albans Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

Contents Introduction: Graced and Courageous by Stephen Burns

1 The Virgin Mary and the Feminist Quest

2 Mary: For Everyone

3 Regarding Mary and the Trinity: The Anglican Position

4 Bone of Contention

5 The Nativity in Recent Poetry

6 Mary: For Now

7 Annunciation: A Sermon

117

8 The Royal Mail

121

9 Assumption: A Sermon

123

Acknowledgements

127

Introduction: Graced and Courageous by Stephen Burns Grace is Not Faceless is a collection of writings by Ann Loades on Mary. Some readers will wish to launch straight into Ann’s own writing, which follows on immediately from this Introduction. Other readers, however, may first choose to begin with the reminders below. The reminders are about Mary in the wider Christian tradition1 and Anglicanism (Ann’s tradition) in particular. Some notes then set Ann’s writing on Mary in relation to her wider work, as well as among Anglicans like and unlike herself, so providing different pathways to Ann’s writing itself. 1. Mary Gospels As Beverley Roberts Gaventa—who has produced the main work on Mary in scripture2—notes, ‘The New Testament offers only fleeting glimpses of Mary’.3 She is not a major figure in the canonical gospels. In fact, bar Mark 6:3, the first gospel is silent about her. In Matthew, though, she gains a few entries: 1:16 includes her name in Jesus’ genealogy; 1:18-25 presents her being spoken of in Joseph’s dream, and 1:27 calls her ‘virgin’/‘young woman’. In Matthew 12:46-50 she tries to speak to Jesus; and she is mentioned again in 13:58. Beverly Roberts Gaventa suggests that in Matthew’s gospel Mary is ‘threatened and threatening’. She is threatened in that she is vulnerable to both Herod and Joseph (who may reject her), and she is threatening in so far as she is embroiled in secrets, and, potentially, a threat (if she says ‘no’) to God’s plan. In Luke’s gospel, Mary is a major figure in the birth narrative of 1:52:52. Indeed, she might even be imagined as a source of the narrative, given its apparent insights into her thoughts. She wants—but seems to fail—to 1

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speak to Jesus in 8:19-21 (cf. Matt. 12:46-50), she is mentioned indirectly in 11:27-28, and in Luke’s second volume, Acts of the Apostles, she is depicted as being present at Pentecost (Acts 1:4). Beverly Roberts Gaventa suggests that the Lucan portrayal of Mary has a three-fold focus: disciple, prophet, and mother. She is disciple (even ‘slave’ [Luke 1:38]—with the New Testament Greek also meaning ‘child’, of God), saying ‘let it be to me according to your word’ in response to the divine messenger who visits her. She is prophet, singing the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55)—also known as the ‘Canticle of Mary’ or, in the Orthodox tradition, ‘Ode of the Theotokos’— her song of praise to God who looks upon and lifts up the lowly, evoked in response to her relative Elizabeth’s acclamation, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’ (Luke 1:42). And she is of course mother, with Luke 1:43 the origin of the later widespread affirmation of her as Theotokos, that is ‘God-bearer’, or ‘Mother of God’. John’s gospel then has two foci on Mary, in John 2:1-11 and 19:25-27. Curiously John never mentions her by name, but refers to her as either ‘woman’ or ‘mother’—perhaps as part of an anti-Docetic agenda, Docetism being a heresy that Christ’s body was only seemingly and not really fully human. Stories about the woman who was his mother might have been meant to contest this idea. In any case, Gaventa’s moniker for Mary in the Fourth Gospel is: ‘Cana and the Cross’. As significant for doctrine about Mary as any canonical gospel is a particular non-canonical text: The Protoevangelium of James, a text with second-century origins, is unlike its non-canonical contemporaries as well as canonical counterparts in being unusually focused on the figure of Mary. It is The Protoevangelium of James that yields to the Christian tradition the names of Mary’s parents (Anna and Joachim). It gives an account of her privileged family (contra the canon). It tells the story of Mary’s cloistering by Anna and Mary’s childhood in the temple, weaving scarlet and purple. It suggests Mary’s marriage to Joseph four years before the birth of Jesus (contra the canon again); and it identifies the place of her giving birth to Jesus as a cave (once more, contra the canon). The Protoevangelium of James also portrays Jesus’ first miracle not as making wine at the wedding of Cana (as John 2), but the healing of Salome’s hand. Perhaps most importantly for later doctrine, it claims Mary’s virgin state as she gave birth to Jesus.4 Feasts Anna and Joachim are just two of the saints amongst whom, in Catholic tradition at least, Jesus is imagined as being ‘always in company’, ‘never see[n] alone’.5 Mary is singled out amongst the saints in every single Roman

Introduction: Graced and Courageous by Stephen Burns

Catholic eucharistic prayer, and she is the central focus of twelve days in the sanctorale, or calendar of the saints, of the Roman Church.6 Christmastide entries into the calendar were first to emerge (in the fifth century, and it seems at first on December 26);7 in the Roman Catholic tradition, January 1 remains, as it has long been, a ‘Solemnity of Mary’—whereas by contrast, in Protestant traditions, it is more typically given to ‘The Naming and Circumcision of Jesus’, as in the Church of England’s Common Worship. (A wider range of tradition at large, though, may allow for some sort of Marian focus in the season of Advent, with its emphasis on preparing for Christ’s arrival.) In some contexts—and notably narratives of the fifth-century empress Pulcheria—devotions to do with nativity explicitly involved the idea that others might ‘give birth to God mystically’, ‘in the soul’,8 as Mary had done in her body. Inclusion of days dedicated to Mary in the Christmas calendar was closely followed by a day given to the Feast of the Assumption (August 15), which was widespread by the sixth century. As Johannine language may have had anti-Docetic targets, fifth-century Marian mysticism had in its sights Nestorianism. Nestorius had famously declared that ‘God is not a baby two or three months old’, with his views of Christ’s lessthan-full humanity a provocation for the Council of Ephesus in 431. In Constantinople, Pulcheria had named new church buildings after Mary as another part of her commendation of Marian devotion, and the ways in which Nestorius’ ideas upset devotees of Mary seems to have been key to his downfall. While contemporaneous ‘orthodox’ preachers in Pulcheria’s circle proclaimed ‘let nature leap for joy’, ‘all humanity dance’—and not least ‘women be honoured’9— on account of Mary, creedal statements emerging from the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon (451) brought forward what may be the more restrained but nonetheless determined ascription: Theotokos, ‘Mother of God’—that is, more than merely ‘mother of the man’. Lavish sermonising continued to flourish, with Mary declared, on defeat of Nestorius’ views, as ‘venerable treasure of all the world, the inextinguishable lamp, the crown of virginity, the sceptre of orthodoxy, the indestructible temple, the container of the Uncontainable, the Mother and Virgin, the source of the one of whom it is said in the holy Gospels, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”.’10 Note, not least, the ascription, ‘sceptre of orthodoxy’. Doctrinal definition and overflowing honour most likely both reflect longstanding devotion to Mary, with the first extant prayer addressed to Mary, the sub tuum, addressing her as ‘Mother of God’, being third century.

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Prayer Whatever Marian devotions are this old, others took strong hold later: notably the rosary, a version of which has some roots in the twelfth-century, when it was popularised in association with St Dominic (1170-1221), whose legend has him receiving a vision of Mary in which, along with her pressed milk, he is given instructions for the rosary’s use.11 Over time, use of the rosary has evolved, to focus on a skein of mysteries in the life of Jesus, and in recent times it has been especially commended by Pope John Paul II, who spoke of it as a means by which a believer can ‘sit at the school of Mary and [be] led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ and to experience the depth of his love’.12 John Paul II also introduced a new focus to meditation on the life of Christ using the rosary, setting alongside ‘joyful mysteries’ of Christ’s birth (annunciation, visitation, nativity, presentation, and being found in the temple aged 12), ‘sorrowful mysteries’ of his passion (agony, scourging, crowning with thorns, cross-carrying, and crucifixion) and ‘glorious mysteries’ of his (and Mary’s) risen life (his resurrection and ascension, Pentecost, her assumption and her crowning as queen of heaven), an additional new emphasis on ‘luminous mysteries’ (baptism, Cana, proclamation of the divine reign, transfiguration, and eucharist). Notably, perhaps because of its invitation to scriptural imagination, the rosary has been amenable to at least some Protestants.13 Other devotions to Mary meld other scriptural allusions in creative ways—a prime example being the mid-sixteenth century Litany of Loreto with its cascade of images: ‘Mirror of justice, Seat of wisdom, Cause of our joy’, ‘ ‘Mystical rose … House of gold, Ark of the covenant’, ‘Refuge’ and ‘help’—as she had already long been named by the sub tuum, and ‘Queen’: of angels, prophets, apostles, all saints, and families. If this litany has Italian origins, the sanctorale associates Mary with various places (for example, Lourdes, France), and so do a skein of apparitions in other places: Guadalupe, Mexico (1531), Fatima, Portugal (1917), Kibeho, Rwanda (1981) and Medjugorje, Yugoslavia (now Croatia) (1981), amongst them. Anglicanism The Anglican tradition has entered into some of this heritage and trajectory, but has not done so uniformly. In the Reformation-era, Marian shrines were destroyed, pilgrimages suppressed, rosaries banned, the Hail Mary removed from common prayer, with, therein, an oscillating range of reference to Mary in authorised prayer. The first vernacular service to be published was the Litany, in 1544, and that included an invocation, ‘Holy

Introduction: Graced and Courageous by Stephen Burns

Virgin Mary, Mother of God our Saviour Jesus Christ, pray for us’, though this was removed from the first full prayer book, of 1549. The 1549 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) did name Mary in the prayers of the people, but had its strongest Marian focus in a commemoration in communion giving ‘high praise and hearty thanks, for the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all thy Saints from the beginning of the world: And chiefly for the glorious and most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of thy Son …’. That 1549 book also referred to—but did not address—Mary as ‘our Lady’. And notably, it did not include a calendar day for the Assumption.14 The next prayer book, of 1552, went much further in a reforming direction, removing the 1549 eucharistic reference to Mary, and indeed excluding her name and reference to the saints. However, whatever prayer books have or have not allowed, Marian devotion has oftentimes been present among Anglicans: at the very least, Mary continued to be present in the environment of Anglican worship in churches named after her, (a few surviving) statues and (much more) stained glass, in major festivals (two were deemed ‘biblical’: Annunciation and Purification) as well as three lesser festivals (visitation, nativity and her conception, which is marked in the calendar of the BCP of 1662, on 8 December). Mary has perhaps remained most present to Anglicans, however, via the Magnificat—which is a default text in the 1662 BCP evening service, and remains a key part of Evensong in some Anglican contexts—that is, at least where Evensong prevails these days.15 As Paul Williams asserts, ‘The place of the Virgin Mary in Anglican tradition is assured because of Mary’s place in the Gospel tradition’,16 notwithstanding the ‘scant’ character of the gospels’ witness with regard to her. Mary became altogether more significant in Anglicanism through the Oxford Movement, which incrementally drew in aspects of Roman devotion: for example, use of litanies of invocation, with the subtle addition of the word ‘may’ (so, ‘N., pray for us’ becomes ‘May N. pray for us’). Notably, Oxford Movement personality John Keble (1792-1866) published a poem posthumously, ‘Mother Out of Sight’, which speaks of saying ‘Ave’ to Mary as ‘children come ... to elders in some happy home’.17 Immaculate Conception, Glorious Assumption The date of Keble’s poem (it was written in 1846) is close to Pope Pius IX’s promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December 1854, and the first of two Roman dogmas that form what have sometimes been identified as the ‘most awkward’ differences between Anglican and

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Roman Catholic perspectives.18 Indeed, of the two dogmas, the Immaculate Conception has been said to be ‘the most problematic’ of all.19 This dogma asserts that Mary was, ‘from the first moment of her conception, by the singular grace and privilege of almighty God and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ the Saviour of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin’. This dogma protects Mary from sin altogether, from the first, as well as after her consent to, and giving birth to Jesus, hence ‘perpetually’ virgin. Most Protestants might now perhaps regard the dogma as unconfirmed by scripture, though many figures in Protestant thought (Martin Luther, John Calvin, the Wesley brothers, and various Anglican divines) apparently all assented to the content of the doctrine, albeit evidently often resistant to what they saw as ‘misdirected’ devotional practices associated with it. The Assumption of Mary into heaven is the second of the two dogmas. It was promulgated by Pope Pius XII in 1950—as sociologist Peter Berger has noted, ‘on the very eve of Sputnik as it were’.20 This dogma asserts that ‘the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory’. If the Immaculate Conception was sometimes tracked back to The Protoevangelium of James, the Assumption was related to a fourth-century document, De Obitu S. Dominae. Yet more influential on the development and reception of the idea of Mary’s assumption was St John of Damascus who wrote that ‘Mary died in the presence of all the apostles, but [ ] her tomb, when upon the request of St Thomas, was found empty’, leading the apostles to conclude that her body was taken to heaven. Though this story is not scriptural, it places Mary alongside scriptural figures like Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11). Revelation 12’s imagery of a woman clothed with the sun gave the doctrine some pictorial collateral, funding the notion of Mary as Queen of Heaven, as found in the Litany of Loreto and many other sources of Catholic devotion. Bi-lateral ecumenical dialogue between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, through the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), produced a document in 2005, Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ. The document suggests that Anglicans might both recognise the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption as consonant with scripture and acknowledge a common faith with Roman Catholics concerning Mary. This may be so, the document posits, at least if they start with scriptural affirmation of fullness of grace (Luke 1:28) in Mary, and then insert this affirmation into a wider doctrine of predestination (drawn from Romans

Introduction: Graced and Courageous by Stephen Burns

8:30) turned to speak of Mary’s foreknown role to be the Mother of God. Key for the ARCIC statement, the Assumption celebrates God’s action in Mary, taking her into divine glory, whilst the Immaculate Conception means that Mary has need of Christ as saviour, but that Christ’s salvation is, as it were, ‘reached “back’’’21 to her, so that the redemption of the cross is in her ‘out of sequence’, with God’s glory filling her from the beginning. Whatever the historicity of the dogmas, or indeed the cogency of their various expressions, their pastoral import, and reasons for their reception, might, perhaps, be discerned via note of the day in 1954 on which the Assumption was promulgated: 1 November, that is, in the liturgical calendar, All Saints’ Day. The dogmas may, in a generous reading, be understood as being, in some sense, about all people: for although they give special honour to Mary, they witness to a grace that the Christian tradition alleges is for all. Interestingly, feminist theologians are among those who hold this conviction most strongly, a vivid example being Ivone Gebara and Clara Bingemer in their ‘dogmatics of the poor’, Mary: Mother of God, Mother of Poor, a book that relentlessly seeks and sees Mary as the clue that ‘God’s glory shine[s] on what is regarded as insignificant, degrading, or marginal’.22 So the Immaculate Conception reveals the ‘yearnings and longings, the divine proposal for humankind, already achieved’,23 ‘God’s preference for the humblest, the littlest, and the most oppressed’,24 and so foreshadows what is true of all the needy. And Mary’s Assumption is the ‘complete fulfilment of the whole woman, Mary’, an image of the final destiny to which all are called, and so a ‘hope-inspiring horizon’.25 To affirm and ‘exalt Mary, immaculately conceived, assumed into heaven’ as these doctrines do is, for Gebara and Bingemer, to insist that ‘in exalting her, they exalt precisely her poverty, her dispossession ...’26 and so they stir hope that God’s reign can indeed be achieved ‘on this poor earth’. 2. Ann Searching for lost coins, etc. Ann Loades is perhaps best-known for her work in feminist theology:27 Searching for Lost Coins (1987)28 was the first monograph on feminist theology to emerge from a British university-based academic. It was in Searching for Lost Coins that Ann Loades first wrote about Mary, uncluttering traditions about the mother of Jesus from those about Mary of Magdala. This was in a chapter called ‘god/goddess’ that also discussed ‘feminine’ images of the divine, in which Ann asserted a view she has

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continued to hold, that naming towards God as ‘mother’ is not in and of itself transformative, unless allied to real efforts to change things for the better for women. Some ‘traditional’ language — for example, ‘Lord’ — may in fact remain valuable for ‘put[ting] even the best “lords” of this world in their places’.29 Hence, it is political. Ann later published Feminist Theology: A Reader (1990),30 a collection that was instrumental in introducing many readers to feminist theology, lifting up voices from the movement then gathering force from around the North Atlantic.31 One extract included in the reader, by Merry Weisner, focused on Mary: ‘Luther and Women: The Death of Two Marys’. A decade later came Feminist Theology: Voices from the Past (2000).32 Whereas Searching for Lost Coins had ranged across the work of many authors (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Daly, Emily Dickinson, Helen Waddell, Simone Weil, among various others), Voices from the Past explored in detail the thought of just three women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Josephine Butler and Dorothy L. Sayers. None of these three forebears in Ann Loades’ own Anglican tradition made Mary a particular focus in their work, and so Mary does not appear in that book.33 Between 1990 and 2000, though, Ann Loades herself made Mary central in some of her own other writing. So in 1990 she contributed an essay ‘The Virgin Mary in the Feminist Quest’ to a collection, After Eve.34 In this, Ann engaged with the teaching on Mary in the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council and some subsequent papal statements, noting some problems from her feminist perspective. Ann also took up invitations to speak to the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary (ESBVM), resulting in further publications pushing forward exploration of—sometimes pushing back on—the Roman Church’s teaching.35 Then in 2000, Ann addressed the International Mariological-Marian Congress in Rome, on the position of Mary in Anglicanism, and in which she amongst other things considered creedal formulations on Christ’s conception by Mary and the Holy Spirit.36 This address represented a turn in Ann’s work to Marian thought in the Anglican tradition and served as a precursor to later assessment of the official ARCIC dialogue on Mary. In several pieces of Ann’s work on Mary, then, one can see main lines and key aspects of recent Roman Catholic and Anglican thinking on Mary. But the vista is bigger than that given by official representatives of those churches’ Marian doctrine, because Ann also explores critique of that by feminists in those churches. For example, the views of Elizabeth Johnson and Tina Beattie—two Roman Catholic theologians whose main Marian work was published in the early years of the new millennium—are crucial

Introduction: Graced and Courageous by Stephen Burns

in influencing Ann’s own views as they emerge over time, as can be seen especially in another essay of Ann’s, ‘Mary: Bone of Contention’ (2009),37 from a book on ‘women in the New Testament and their afterlives’. In gathering these essays, Grace is Not Faceless therefore provides a wider and critical view of official teaching on Mary by the churches in the last halfcentury, pointing up clear gaps where official teaching has not absorbed what it, in Ann’s view, might and should have learned from Christian feminists. As Ann puts things rather forcefully in ‘Bone of Contention’, their feminist perspectives are ‘completely ignored by the [ARCIC’s Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ], presumably because [feminist perspectives] are not yet deemed to be part of the “tradition’’. The first essays in this book, then, explore ecclesial teaching, and feminist Marian thinkers’ ideas, and work into the space between them. Alongside these essays, Grace is Not Faceless adds some others. ‘The Nativity in Recent Poetry’ (2009), written for a collection on ‘new perspectives on the nativity’,38 attends to the art-form referenced in its title, whereas ‘Mary: For Now’ (2019), previously unpublished, provides much wider angles on the contemporary arts that might inform Marian doctrine and devotion at the present time. Poetry has been present in Ann’s work at least since Searching for Lost Coins, with the rationale for its presence articulated succinctly in that book: ‘I do not conceive resources for theological reflection in too narrow terms’.39 In its use of poetry, this essay is characteristic of a number of other pieces of her writing.40 The new essay on wider art forms reflects her more recent work on a whole variety of media,41 especially the novel form, focusing on the work of Evelyn Underhill and Dorothy L. Sayers, before exploring the biblical studies by Margaret Barker on the way to an ending that engages with contemporary trauma theory. All of these essays are followed by a couple of Ann’s sermons on Mary, one which was preached at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, and another given at the All Saints Scottish Episcopal Church, St Andrews. These enrich the genres in which Ann Loades has thought and spoken about Mary, rounding out the picture of Ann’s own Marian convictions, and they are complemented in turn by a commentary commissioned from her to accompany the British Royal Mail’s stamps for Christmas 2019. These stamps placed Ann’s texts in a presentation pack42 alongside images where they would inevitably reach far wider than to audiences of professional theologians, ecumenical gatherings, feminist circles, or particular assemblies of worship. Included here is the full text Ann contributed to the presentation pack, from which fragments appeared on the stamps themselves.

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More voices Ann is among a small number of Anglicans who have made Mary a focus of their work in recent years, A. M. (Donald) Allchin, Roger Greenacre, John Macquarrie and Nicola Slee being notable among those who have shared a keen interest in her. The distinctiveness of Ann’s voice becomes clear by some comparison of their contributions. John Macquarrie (1919-2007), a professional theologian like Ann, tackles amongst other things the Roman dogmas head on in order to make something of them, and he does so with an ecumenical concern which his title reflects: Mary for All Christians.43 His book, like this one, also collects papers presented over a period of time, some of which also began life as talks to the ESBVM. The first chapter of Macquarrie’s book is on ‘God and the feminine’, from 1975, and while affirming that ‘the movement toward greater equality’ is an ‘aspect’ of ‘the sexual revolution’ that ‘must commend itself to Christians’, it makes no engagement with the then nascent movement of feminist theology. Nor do figures associated with that movement appear in chapters of the book that have later origins, when the movement had grown in strength. Roger Greenacre (1931-2011), like Macquarrie, was an ordained priest, though working from posts in parishes and cathedrals and not universities. Like Macquarrie’s book Mary for All Christians, Greenacre’s Maiden, Mother and Queen (published posthumously in 2013) also incorporates addresses to the ESBVM, and its focus is suggested by the book’s subtitle: ‘Mary in the Anglican tradition’, albeit also—like Macquarrie—with ecumenical dialogue in view. Just as Macquarrie sees ‘the sexual revolution as an ambiguous development’, Greenacre names ‘the feminist movement’ as ‘ambiguous’, indeed sometimes ‘radically hostile’, not just to ‘traditional Mariology’ but to ‘Christian orthodoxy’. However, Greenacre states a view that ‘a lot of [the feminist movement] has been positive’ as a stimulus to some to explore the place of Mary in Christian theology and spirituality. It is notable, then, that of the more-than-ten-page index, Mary is one of very few women mentioned—others being the biblical Elizabeth (numerous references), Queen Elizabeth I (one reference), and Cinderella (two references). So the feminist movement does not really show up. There are, however, multiple references to ‘women, ordination of ’, about which Greenacre remained ‘agnostic’ and ‘sad’. He would certainly not have agreed with Ann Loades’ position on the ordination of women to the episcopate, the Church of England working group on which she joined only on the clear proviso that

Introduction: Graced and Courageous by Stephen Burns

her view of women’s aptness to be in the order was made known from the start.44 Donald Allchin (1930-2010), like Greenacre, was a priest who did theological work from parishes and cathedrals. Allchin’s learned The Joy of All Creation 45 explores Mary in Anglican tradition, providing highly insightful views of a range of Anglican forebears. Yet it too elides feminist theologians. In fact, with respect to the twentieth-century, Allchin discusses no theologians at all, at least not professional ones, but focuses exclusively on the work of poets: so the Welsh wordsmith Euros Bowen as well as perhaps more widely-known Scot Edwin Muir and American T. S. Eliot are his foci.46 Though Nicola Slee is also prolific in prose, her work The Book of Mary47 is largely a book of poems, albeit with extensive introduction and notes that locate the theological issues at play in her verses. Nicola Slee, like Ann Loades, is an Anglican laywoman. And whereas Allchin, Greenacre and Macquarrie are disengaged from feminist perspectives, like Ann’s work, Nicola Slee’s absorbs, employs and advances them.48 In Slee’s case, she sometimes makes direct reference to the writings of feminist theologians in her poetry: so, for example, one chapter of Slee’s Book of Mary is called ‘Truly Our Sister’, after Elizabeth Johnson’s major volume on Mary, and the poem ‘Searching the Faces of Maria’ expands an epitaph of Marcella Althaus-Reid.49 In this company, Ann’s work yields a particular sense of the richness of the tradition, in which, whatsoever some contemporary officials say, includes feminist perspectives, and ideas about what might be done to contest and address the persistent imperviousness to feminist insights of church teaching on Mary. At the same time, we see the appeal of Mary via Ann’s capacity to find resources in the tradition that have not been valued as they ought to be. That is, she manifests the practice of ‘searching for lost coins’, finding treasures waiting to be claimed. Just one example, as readers will see in the following pages, is in relation to depictions of Mary in art of the Rabula Gospels. So Ann shows in her own way something of how in Nicola Slee’s terms Mary might be a ‘mansion’, inviting endless exploration, and still with ability to surprise. As Slee puts things: ‘the whole vast mansion’ of Mary ‘is humming, / a huge belly gestating numerous births’50—words from her poem ‘The Mansion of Mary’, itself a mediation on Kathleen Norris’ conviction that ‘there is a lot of room in Mary’. This is elaborated by Slee in her sense that ‘Mary herself, in all her forms and guises, is a fecund source of life. Whatever difficulties there may be in reclaiming Mary as a woman

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who can inspire contemporary women and men, I believe there is so much that is life-giving and creative … While there is a need to repudiate, for Mary and for us to say “no” to much of what we have inherited, there is also much to affirm, in the spirit of Mary’s radical and faithful “yes” to God’.51 Across Ann Loades’ essays, another distinctive and recurring emphasis is the sheer courage of Mary’s assent to the incarnation, indeed, to quote as Ann does at one point from Denise Levertov’s poetry, ‘courage unparalleled’. And as, over the course of Grace is Not Faceless, Ann draws several times on the phrase which gives this book its title—a pithy idiom of Dominican, Cornelius Ernst — it can reasonably be concluded that this too distils more of Ann’s own central convictions about Mary. Seemingly affecting for her, this image also extends an invitation to readers to consider how Mary in the first instance, but others in their turn, might manifest the mystery to which Mary gives her courageous assent.

Introduction: Graced and Courageous by Stephen Burns

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION I teach on Mary to a mixed cohort in an ecumenical university. So my class gathers longstanding devotees to Mary from Roman Catholic formation around the world alongside those from a variety of Protestant traditions. The biblical material on Mary, such as it is, is typically unknown or little-known to some, while extra-canonical traditions and devotions may be completely new to the same or other students. My notes may help to orient such readers to Ann Loades’ explorations which follow. 2 Beverly Gaventa, Mary: Glimpses of the Mother of Jesus (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). 3 Gaventa, Mary: Glimpses, p. 100. Also, ‘slender’ (pp. 4, 9), ‘scant’ (pp. 29, 60, 73), ‘glimpses’ (title, p. 2). 4 See Gaventa, Mary: Glimpses, for full text and commentary. See also, for background, Fred Lapham, An Introduction to the New Testament Apocrypha (London: Continuum, 2003), and for wider views of The Protoevangelium of James alongside like-kind texts, J. K. Elliot, The Apocryphal Jesus: Legends of the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) and in particular Chris Maunder, ‘Mary in the New Testament and Apocrypha’, in Sarah Jane Boss, ed., Mary: The Complete Resource (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 11-46. 5 Charles Sherlock and Peter Cross, ‘The Liturgical Commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion’, in Adelbert Denaux and Nicholas Sagovsky, eds, Studying Mary: The Virgin Mary in Anglican and Catholic Theology and Devotion (London: T & T Clark, 2008), pp. 222-243, at p. 222. 6 December 8: Immaculate Conception, January 1: Solemnity of Mary, March 25: Annunciation, and August 15: Assumption of Our Lady are major feast days. February 2: Presentation, May 31: Visitation, September 8: Nativity of Our Lady, and September 15: Our Lady of Sorrows are lesser feasts. February 11: Our Lady of Lourdes, July 16: Our Lady of Carmel, August 5: Dedication of Santa Maria Maggiore, and October 7: Our Lady of the Rosary are commemorations. For those unfamiliar with the schema, the first cluster are considered of most importance, the latter cluster relatively less so. 7 Richard Price, ‘Theotokos: The Title and its Significance in Doctrine and Devotion’, in Sarah Jane Boss, ed., Mary: The Complete Resource (London: Continuum, 2007), 56-73, at p. 59. 8 See discussion in Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson, The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 2011), pp. 196-214, elaborated in Maxwell Johnson, Praying and Believing in Early Christianity: The Interplay Between Christian Worship and Doctrine (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2013). 9 Price, ‘Theotokos’, p. 59. 10 Price, ‘Theotokos’, p. 62. 11 See Sarah Jane Boss, ‘Telling the Beads’, in Sarah Jane Boss, ed., Mary: The Complete Resource (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 385-394. 12 See Francesca Murphy, ‘Immaculate Mary: The Ecclesial Mariology of Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in Sarah Jane Boss, ed., Mary: The Complete Resource (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 300-313, at p. 312. 13 Note, for example, (Methodist) Neville Ward’s Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy (London: Epworth Press, 1971; reprinted by the Episcopal Church press Cowley in 2005). Until the fourteenth century, only the scriptural sentence was used; see Boss, ‘Telling the Beads’, p. 390. 14 In the Church of England’s Common Worship of 2000, August 15 was restored as the principal Marian feast, though Common Worship does not mention the Assumption, whilst hinting at it, perhaps, in asking God that ‘we who are redeemed by [Christ’s] blood / may share with [Mary] in the glory of your eternal kingdom’. Through the latter part of the twentieth century, following South African revision in 1954 which had August 15 as ‘The Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, other churches of the Anglican Communion have again marked this day. 1

Grace is Not Faceless

15 In some Anglican traditions around the world, the Magnificat remains a default text in Evening Prayer; in others, it is one among a range of options. In the new plethora of forms for everyday prayer in the Anglican tradition emerging at the present time, it may not be present regularly, if at all. See Stephen Burns, ‘“Learning Again and Again to Pray”: Anglican Forms of Daily Prayer, 1979-2014,’ Journal of Anglican Studies 15 (2017): 9-36. 16 Paul Williams, ‘The Virgin Mary in Anglican Tradition’, in Sarah Jane Boss, ed., Mary: The Complete Resource (London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 314-339, at p. 315. 17 See discussion in Williams, ‘Anglican Tradition’, and Roger Greenacre, Maiden, Mother, Queen: Mary in the Anglican Tradition (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2013), pp. 115-130. 18 Harriet Harris, ‘A Feminist Response to ARCIC’s Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ’, in GS Misc 872—Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (ARCIC II): Essays by the Faith and Order Advisory Group of the Church of England (London: 2008), pp. 38-47, at p.42. 19 Harris, ‘Feminist Response’, p. 43. 20 Peter Berger, A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (New York, N.Y.: Anchor, 1970), p. 49. 21 ARCIC, Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ, para. 59 (cf. para. 52). See Adelbert Denaux, Nicholas Sagovsky and Charles Sherlock, eds, Looking Towards a Church Fully Reconciled: The Final Report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission 1983-2005 (ARCIC II) (London: SPCK, 2016), p. 210; cf. p. 206. 22 Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, Mary: Mother of God, Mother of the Poor (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1989), p. 92. Note that Gebara and Bingemer’s book is subject to critique by a later Latin American feminist theologian, Marcella Althaus-Reid, in her Indecent Theology (London: Routledge, 2000), with its contention that Latin American women do not necessarily identify with Mary because Mary represents a ‘sexual decency’ that many woman cannot attain. 23 Gebara and Bingemer, Mary, p. 112. 24 Gebara and Bingemer, Mary, p. 113. 25 Gebara and Bingemer, Mary, p. 118. 26 Gebara and Bingemer, Mary, p. 93. 27 See Stephen Burns, ‘Ann Loades (1938 - )’, in Stephen Burns, Bryan Cones and James Tengatenga, eds, Twentieth-century Anglican Theologians (Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 157-166. 28 Ann Loades, Searching for Lost Coins: Explorations in Christianity and Feminism (London: SPCK, 1987). 29 Ann Loades, ‘Finding New Sense in the Sacramental’, in Geoffrey Rowell and Christine Hall, eds, The Gestures of God: Explorations in Sacramentality (London: Continuum, 2004), 161-172, p. 171. 30 Ann Loades, Feminist Theology: A Reader (London: SPCK, 1990). 31 It was complemented by a volume edited by Ursula King, Feminist Theology from The Third World (London: SPCK, 1994). 32 Ann Loades, Feminist Theology: Voices from the Past (Oxford: Polity/Routledge, 2000). 33 Alongside these three, Evelyn Underhill stands as a major figure for Ann’s attention; see Ann Loades, Evelyn Underhill (London: Fount, 1997). A recent essay on Underhill’s novels, which are much less well-known than Underhill’s writing on, say, Mysticism or Worship, reveals the persistent presence of Marian imagery in Underhill’s scenes. See Ann Loades, ‘Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941): Mysticism in Fiction’, in Judith Maltby and Alison Shell, eds, Anglican Women Novelists (London: Continuum, 2019), pp. 73-86. 34 Ann Loades, ‘The Virgin Mary and the Feminist Quest’, in Janet Martin Soskice, ed., After Eve: Women, Theology and the Christian Tradition (London: Collins, 1990), pp. 156-178. 35 Ann Loades, ‘Feminist Theology: A View of Mary’, in William McLoughlin and Jill Pinnock, eds, Mary is for Everyone: Essays on Mary and Ecumenism (Leominster: Gracewing, 1997), pp. 32-40.

Introduction: Graced and Courageous by Stephen Burns

36 Ann Loades, ‘The Position of the Anglican Communion Regarding the Trinity and Mary’, New Blackfriars 82 (2001): 364-374. 37 Ann Loades, ‘Mary: Bone of Contention’, Christine E. Joynes and Christopher C. Rowland, eds, From the Margins 2: Women of the New Testament and their Afterlives (Sheffield: Pheonix, 2009), pp. 53-66. 38 Ann Loades, ‘The Nativity in Recent British Poetry’, in Jeremy Corley, ed., New Perspectives on the Nativity (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 148-163. 39 Loades, Searching, p. 15. 40 Notably, Ann Loades, ‘Word and Sacrament: Recovering Integrity’, in Neil Brown and Robert Gasgone, eds, Faith in the Public Forum (Adelaide: Openbook, 2000), pp. 28-46. 41 Ann Loades, ‘Lazarus Without Limits: Scripture, Tradition, and the Cultural Life of a Text’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 18 (2018): 252-264; Ann Loades, ‘Some Straws in the Wind: Reflections Towards Theological Engagement with Theatre Dance’, Christopher R. Brewer, ed., Christian Theology and the Transformation of Natural Religion: From Incarnation to Sacramentality—Essays in Honour of David Brown (Leuven: Brill, 2018), pp. 193-205. 42 www.royalmail.com/stamps 43 John Macquarrie, Mary for All Christians (London: Collins, 1991). 44 Ann Loades, ‘Women in the Episcopate?’ Anvil 21 (2004): 113-119. 45 A. M. Allchin, The Joy of All Creation: An Anglican Meditation on the Place of Mary (London: New City Press, [2] 1993). 46 Note also Gordon Wakefield, ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary in Some Modern Poets’, in William McLoughlin and Jill Pinnock, eds, Mary is for Everyone: Essays on Mary and Ecumenism (Leominster: Gracewing, 1997), pp. 294-303. 47 Nicola Slee, The Book of Mary (London: SPCK, 2007), the middle of a series of books of poems: Praying Like a Woman (London: SPCK, 2004) and Seeking the Risen Christa (London: SPCK, 2011). 48 An essay of Nicola Slee’s also features in Feminist Theology: A Reader. 49 Ch. 4 in ‘Truly Our Sister’, Ch. 10, ‘Searching for the Faces of Maria’—a line from Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology (London: SCM Press, 2004), p. 43. 50 Slee, Book of Mary, p. 3. 51 Slee, Book of Mary, p. 12.